Having little to no experience in the theatre, Beckett significantly revised the text in rehearsal and in the English translation that followed in 1954, a pattern which continued in the following decades, when he frequently directed his own plays in multiple languages. Samuel Beckett wrote his most famous play between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949, as a relaxation from the ‘awful prose’ of the trilogy he was writing at the time, and it soon became a worldwide success after its Paris premiere at the Théâtre de Babylone in January 1953. One of my favorite threads in 'Fin de Partie'/'Endgame,' edited by Van Hulle and.This volume of the BDMP analyses the genesis of En attendant Godot. It is thus the one play that not only accumulates his early experiences with theatre, but also his later evolution as a playwright and director of his own plays' ( Godot 38). 2 And then Godot is envisaged as not only Beckett's first great theatrical success but in a sense also his last, for its evolution beyond its initial publication and production is equally compelling in itself and as grist for this project: 'Beckett continued revising Godot from its inception in the late 1940s to the late 1980s.

For example, in 'Beckett's Tragicomedy,' the introduction to the Godot volume, Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst trace Godot's few and little-known 'Theatrical Precursors'- Le Kid, 'a burlesque of Pierre Corneille's seventeenth-century four-act tragedy, Le Cid,' as well as a take-off of Charlie Chaplin's 1921 film, The Kid Mittelalterliches Dreieck ( Medieval Triangle) 'Human Wishes' and Eleuthéria-and their paving the path to Beckett's first great dramatic achievement ( Godot 29, 30). Whether or not one is interested in the minutiae of changes from one manuscript or print text to the next that are enumerated in the many charts and comparative lists contained in these volumes, the sixth and seventh of the series, they contain numerous gems and nuggets that reveal much about the processes that led to the writing, translating, publication, and staging of these two extraordinary plays. Each volume situates a Beckett work in the context of his overall career, its genesis as multiple texts (in English, French, and, where relevant, German), and the changes he made for theatrical productions and post-genesis publication. Malone Meurt/Malone Dies.Įach of the volumes includes a complete descriptive catalog of all relevant manuscripts, including drafts and notebook jottings a critical and historic reconstruction of the text, including its genesis the process of composition, publications, and productions and a detailed guide to exploring the manuscripts through online modules that comprise digital facsimiles and transcriptions of all the extant manuscripts. Stirrings Still/ Soubresauts and Comment Dire/What Is the Word 2. The series, which was awarded the Modern Language Association of America's 2018 prize for a Bibliography, Archive, or Digital Project, has previously published the following volumes: 1. 1 Drawing on Beckett's letters, diaries, annotations, and the like, Dirk Van Hulle and his collaborators seek to enable scholars and other readers to access the available manuscripts of all of Beckett's writings and thus to study their relationships and genesis, while also helping to preserve them by keeping them removed from direct contact with researchers. The project also offers an online platform that digitally reunites all extant manuscripts of Beckett's works that are now dispersed over multiple libraries (most notably, the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp, the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading, and the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin), and provides twenty-six corresponding modules with such research tools as transcriptions, a search engine, a detailed guide to exploring the manuscripts, an electronic apparatus variorum, and an analysis of the textual genesis.

The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project ( BDMP), of which these two volumes are the most recent publications, intends eventually to trace the complete textual history of the works of Samuel Beckett in twenty-six volumes, adding at least one a year until the project is complete.

En attendant godot